“Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” As a mother who has raised two sons, I am well versed in the primal human desire—especially among adolescent males—to incinerate things. But Jesus immediately rebuked James and John for suggesting that the inhospitable Samaritan village be destroyed, and the disciples continued towards Jerusalem without invoking further pyrotechnic effects along the way.
And since you and I would never blow up a village, except perhaps in video games, we too can move right along to the more interesting questions of foxes and fathers and following that are raised by today’s Gospel, right? Except that… we really can’t. Because in order to follow Jesus—to follow him into uncertainly, to follow him even when it puts us in conflict with our other ties and traditions—we first need to be free to make the choice for discipleship. And unexamined anger—of the kind that would secretly or publicly have us wanting to incinerate villages— is one of our most pervasive spiritual prisons.
Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian pastor who has written with great humor and wisdom about the spiritual life, observed that “Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”
By that measure, there are a lot of skeletons at the feast of our common life right now. It’s a scary time in history. The January 6 Select Committee has been releasing its disturbing report on the attack on our nation’s capital, and there’s an extraordinary amount of disillusionment and anger on both sides of the truth divide. And increasingly, the divide is weaponized. Our evident unwillingness to address the epidemic of gun violence perpetrated against the most vulnerable—children, students, and people of color—is related to our inability to engage anger in healthy ways.
While summoning fire and shooting semi-automatic weapons may be one particularly unhealthy ways to deal with anger, there are also plenty of polite ways to wreak havoc on people we’re angry with. We can scapegoat them and—if we have political or positional power—punish them, as our justice system has been known to do with people of color. We can call them out and cause them shame, as our culture has been known to do with woman and queer people. We can dox or troll them online. There are plenty of flameless ways to summon fire down from heaven.
So little wonder that Paul included anger in his list of works of the flesh, right alongside fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. “I am warning you,” wrote Paul to the church in Galatia, “those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”
And as Jesus himself pointed out, what’s at stake in our everyday decisions is no less than the kingdom of God, for which “no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back” is fit. By the ninth chapter of Luke, the stakes have gotten pretty high for Jesus’ ministry; he has set his face towards Jerusalem—where prophets go to be executed—as Jesus himself observed. So it matters whether his disciples are free enough from their own retributive anger to faithfully follow him into the site of certain violence.
But on the other hand, remember that when Jesus arrived in Jerusalem, he himself was plenty angry at—for example—those who were exploiting the Temple. Which suggests to me that what Paul had in mind—when he listed anger among the sinful desires of the flesh—was a particular kind of anger. That is, the anger that would cause us to smack our lips over grievances long past—as Buechner poetically described it—or the anger that would do damage to other people by raining down fire or its contemporary equivalents, or the anger that would hold us back from wholeheartedly following Jesus.
Read within the overall context of our scriptures, anger is not a bad thing: indeed it’s often prophetic stance. The difference seems to be whether our anger causes further damage, or whether it’s intended to disrupt the damage-doing that is already occurring. Does our anger increase the number of victims, or does it support victims and increase the possibility of reconciliation? That’s the difference between the anger that binds us and the anger that frees us. Recall that even the Holy Spirit herself was known to appear as fire from heaven. But rather than destroying, the flame-like tongues of Pentecost gave the gift of communication.
I’ve certainly been implicated in implicated in both kinds of anger. I’m noticing, for example, how I react to debate online. I do a fair amount of ministry on facebook—you may or may not know that—and like all other social media, it has the capacity to get mean. Meaner than any one of us would ever be in person. I have a habit of simply “un-friending” and blocking people who interact on facebook that way. Which is OK, except that when I do that I’ve effectively burned down the virtual village we share. Or to use another popular expression, I’ve “ghosted” that person, erasing them from whatever relationship we may have had, without so much telling them why. A person wiser, and freer of my own kind of frustration and anger, might stay in the conversation and try to keep it civil.
Which is actually all of our responsibility these days. We all have hard conversations going on within our extended families, and we are all embroiled in our divisive political discourse. But we know that one of the fruits of the Spirit is self-control, which allows us to be people of peace in difficult villages, so to speak. Not every battle is ours to fight, and some situations need patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness and gentleness. But you know that, because I’ve seen you exercising all these gifts. Let’s support each other in using these gifts, especially when the going gets hard.
We can do what Jesus did—that is our baptismal commitment—but we cannot do it alone. When he set his face towards Jerusalem, he also set the example for all of us to move out of our comfort zones into the places of risk. We can do that together. We can hold each other accountable to use the gifts of the Spirit, and fearlessly examine what holds us back. And I think that’s what Paul had in mind when he enumerated the desires of the flesh. These are not so much innate character traits as they are compulsions, which we are invited to let go of in order that Christ may dwell in us and lead us.
And fortunately the Spirit has given us other habits to cultivate in the place of our compulsions: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. May each of these be our walking meditation—and our encouragement to each other—as we practice the freedom of following Jesus.
